this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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The article is quite interesting and has nothing to do with Google customizing results based on location, which many commenters seem to be assuming. Rather, the article is taking about how you can get dramatically different results by searching for the same thing in different languages. While that is pretty obvious, since the "same word" in two different languages is effectively 2 entirely different words to a computer, there are some interesting implications to it.
Because that's what the title says. Language isn't location.
Different results based on language is even more obvious of a fact than location, though. It would take an insane amount of work to prevent, even if it wasn't obviously the desired outcome.
So it is about languages instead of “where you live”. Can’t Harvard researchers get the title right?
Or are they assuming that languages are only associated with where people live?
i feel like this is a big part of it. it reminds me of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. search results and neural networks are susceptible to bias just like a human is; “garbage in garbage out” as they say.
the quote directly after mentions that newer or more precise searches produce more coherent results across languages. that reminds me of the time i got curious and looked up Marxism on Conservapedia. as you might expect, the high level descriptions of Marxism are highly critical and include a lot of bias, but interestingly once you dig down to concepts like historical materialism etc it gets harder to spin, since popular media narratives largely ignore those details and any “spin” would likely be blatant falsehood.
the author of the article seems to really want there to be a malicious conspiratorial effort to suppress information, and, while that may be true in some cases, it just doesn’t seem feasible at scale. this is good to call out, but i don’t think these people who concern their lives with the research and advancement of language concepts are sleeping on the fact that bias exists.